My question Ordered sequence of ascending integer combinations was put on hold despite receiving five good answers in the first 12 hours. It has also received a fair few upvotes, as have the answers. If people can answer it, how is it unclear? As of writing this, there are no comments on my question at all.
Dear Peter Taylor, caird coinheringaahing, pajonk, Mego, Cody Gray, would one of you please explain how the question is unclear? As it stands your on hold reason is unclear.
The main reason that I voted to close wasn't because it wasn't unclear, but rather because it was very confusing. I just spent the last 5 minutes reading over the challenge and think that I have understood it, but I'm still not entirely sure.
But let's take a look at the two main parts that caused me to close it.
If the current line is
-, the next line is1+2+ ... n-n=4:
-=>1+2+3+4-If the last integer is equal to n, remove all integers from the end that are immediately followed by a
-, then change the last+to a-n=4:
1-2+3-4-=>1-2-
It seems to me as though 1+2+3+4- is directly followed by 1-2+3-4- which doesn't make sense to me. The steps that you have detailed, and the example you give, show that it happens much later than the first line. It would have definitely been clearer if you had used the first line as an example as it would have logically followed on. Instead I was trying to understand how you got to 1-2+3-4- from 1+2+3+4-.
n = 4:
1+2+3+4-=>1+2+3-
If the last integer is less than n, append the remaining integers with a
+after each one, except the final integer which should have a-appended
The first few times I read this, I had no idea what it was saying. It was only after I read through it quite a few times, and used an example on a piece of paper that I understood what you were trying to say. This could definitely be phrased in a better and clearer way.
I noticed that in this post and your comment on Peter Taylor's answer that you cite your examples as making your post clear. While I agree that they do contribute to its overall clarity, that's not what examples are supposed to do. From things to avoid when writing challenges
Test cases are examples for people to check their understanding of the spec and the correctness of their code. They should not replace an explanation of how the output must relate to the input.
As a final point (and as a cliché point), I would like to remind you of the Sandbox where you can post challenges to get feedback.
(As a side note, can I ask why the lines have to end with -? It doesn't seem very mathematical and messes with my perfectionism.)
- symbols, they're just symbols and don't represent "minus" or "negative". They could just as easily been @ or $. The numbers are also not numbers, they are convenient ways of labelling each value, which must be distinct. They could have been letters, except that it's not obvious what happens after "Z"...
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Jul 15, 2017 at 12:28
Maybe you should ask one of the people who answered it to rewrite the question. I can't really answer "how is it unclear?" because I can't extract enough sense from the question to say "I understand all of it apart from ...". It looks like the output of a Markov chain generator.
